Model changes at manufacturing sites have been frequently observed in recent years, so as to realize small lot production in great varieties. At manufacturing sites of cell production, in order to automate, with use of robots, screwing, fitting and attaching components, inserting flexible boards and the like, polishing, etc., such robots need to be flexibly adaptable to various types of components and to various task steps. Every time components to be handled are replaced, assembling positions, directions, or the like are changed, and the task process is also changed. Accordingly, the robots need to be adapted to these changes.
Those tasks of handling soft articles, such as insertion of a flexible board, are complicated, so that such tasks are still performed manually. A person is capable of performing a complicated task by estimating the degree of warp or the position of such a soft article on the basis of reactive force that can be felt with a hand when the soft article is in contact with a target object and is thus warped.
To the contrary, a robot is incapable of formulating force information or positional information on a soft article that is warped in a different manner or at a different portion in each trial. Accordingly, it is quite difficult for such a robot to perform a complicated task in accordance with acquired reactive force. There are strong demands for solving this problem to achieve automation, by means of robots, of those tasks that have been primarily performed manually.
There has been adopted, as a method of teaching a robot a task, direct teaching of touching to teach the robot. There is also an example of dealing with variation in environment or in work by extracting the relationship (referred to as a sensory feedback rule) between information on the environment and information on manipulation by a person of a robot from obtained taught data and applying the data upon automatically replaying the robot (see Patent Literatures 1 and 2). The direct teaching is applied, for example, to an origami-folding task that requires a sensory feedback rule based on variation in minute force information (see Non-Patent Literature 1).